xfreerdp clipboard
Posted: 2015-11-23 08:45:24 by Alasdair Keyes
You can allow XfreeRDP under Linux to access your clipboard, run it with the following plugin enabled
xfreerdp --plugin cliprdr hostname
No more typing in 32 character passwords key by key!
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Inbox Zero
Posted: 2015-11-21 15:43:24 by Alasdair Keyes
Having recently started a new job, I've started trying to implement Inbox Zero.
Although I don't stick to it's 5 points religiously, I find the basic premise extremely useful and have adapted it to a way that I find most useful.
I now use my inbox as part of my todo list, when I look at my inbox I now apply the following rules
- It doesn't require action and I don't need to refer to it. (e.g. Marketing email from vendor). :: DELETE
- It doesn't require action but has information I may need to refer back to it in future. (e.g. Message from colleague). :: FILE IT
- It needs me to do something at a specific point in the future. (e.g. Meeting invitation or Message to call customer next Monday). :: ADD TO CALENDAR then FILE IT
- It needs action that I can do quickly now. :: ACTION IT
- Keep it in the inbox for processing later.
At this point, the only things I have to worry about are what's in the inbox as soon as I have dealt with them, I file it and move onto the next one.
So far, it's working well, after 7 weeks on the job my inbox this weekend is 1!
I'm now slowly trying to apply it to my personal emails too...
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OpenVPN and Android Lollipop connection problems
Posted: 2015-10-09 23:49:23 by Alasdair Keyes
I recently bought myself a One Plus 2 Android based phone. My previous and trusty Samsung Galaxy S1 had been with me for over 4 years and was starting to be unusably slow.
I won't go on about the Oneplus, reviews can be found all over the internet, however I decided to connect it to my OpenVPN setup... which wasn't as easy as I thought it might be.
The Google Play store has the official OpenVPN Connect client, which connected to my server correctly but seemed to consistently fail to add in it's routes. After trying unsuccessfully for a while, I came to the conclusion that it couldn't be made to work.
I removed this app and went for OpenVPN for Android, setup was just as easy as OpenVPN Connect and still had an issue with adding pushed routes. It thankfully has the option of adding custom routes on the client, under Routing set a custom route of 0.0.0.0/0 and you will be routing all your non-local traffic to your VPN, much needed when you're regularly connecting to unknown wifi networks.
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Packtpub Free Learning eBooks
Posted: 2015-10-09 16:24:43 by Alasdair Keyes
Yesterday Russ informed me of Packtpub's Free Learning offer.
Every day, a new eBook is available for free so you can continue learning at reduced cost.
Just visit https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning, sign up and click the "Claim Your Free eBook" button.
To make this a little easier, I created a quick Perl script you can add to cron once per day and it'll email you with details of the current eBook
wget -Oget_packtpub_botd.pl https://gitlab.com/snippets/1731322/raw
chmod 755 get_packtpub_botd.pl
Add to cron and you'll get an email once a day saying...
Today's book is 'Making Big Data Work for Your Business'
https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning
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Permission Denied when scanning in Linux Mint
Posted: 2015-10-05 20:28:03 by Alasdair Keyes
I bought a Brother DCP-L2500D Printer/scanner yesterday. After some trepidation as to whether I would be able to use it under Linux, a quick Google search showed that Brother provided drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux. Kudos Brother, it's nice to see companies supporting all their customers not just the high volume users.
After installation of the Drivers into Linux Mint, I could print but not scan. Every time I tried I received the following error.
When trying to scan with XSane I would get
Failed to open device `brother4:bus1:dev1': Invalid argument
And under Simple Scan I would get
Failed to scan - Unable to connect to scanner
As I could print, I assumed the device was correct, so the failure to open device error indicated a permissions issue.
Although CUPS doesn't make use of the traditional device /dev/usb/lp0 (but instead uses a separate identifier usb://Brother/DCP-L2500D%20series?serial=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX), looking at this device showed that it was owned by the lp group
ls -al /dev/usb/lp0
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 0 Oct 5 20:13 /dev/usb/lp0
Although I was a member of the lpadmin group, I wasn't part of lp
$ id alasdair
uid=1000(alasdair) gid=1000(alasdair) groups=1000(alasdair),4(adm),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),108(lpadmin),110(sambashare)
A quick change to my group ownership, then logging out and back in sorted it out and allowed me to scan.
$ sudo usermod -Ga lp alasdair
$ id alasdair
uid=1000(alasdair) gid=1000(alasdair) groups=1000(alasdair),4(adm),7(lp),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),108(lpadmin),110(sambashare)
If you get this issue, remember to logout/login before trying to scan again, it's key as a usermod won't take effect until you do.
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Easier IE Development
Posted: 2015-08-20 12:03:54 by Alasdair Keyes
If you ever need to do Web development, you know just how much of a pain cross-browser compatability is, specifically Internet Explorer. To make this a little easier, Microsoft have released a number of VMs to allow you to test lots of IE versions.
https://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/
They have VMs for a number of different Hypervisors across a number of platforms.
It's nice to see Microsoft providing support for Linux and Mac users.
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Spamassassin CountryFilter 0.02 Released - IPv6
Posted: 2015-08-12 12:09:57 by Alasdair Keyes
An updated version of the CountryFilter plugin for SpamAssassin https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/countryfilter-spamassassin has been released.
The new version now has Country Mapping and filtering support for IPv6 addresses. For Anyone using it, please make sure you check the README.md file on installation as the configuration file now has 2 new config lines to specify GeoIP database paths.
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LXC
Posted: 2015-08-10 16:30:26 by Alasdair Keyes
Containerisation seems to be taking over the OpenSource world at the moment, the increased uptake of systems like Docker is enabling systems admins and developers to perform rapid app deployment with increased portability.
Parallels proved the power of containerisation with their OpenVZ and Virtuozzo containerisation platforms showing that with the lower overheads you could run 2-3 times as many containers as you could VMs on a given bit of hardware. Containers aren't quite as isolated as VMs, but for most use cases they will do the job.
I had a cause today to require a number of machines that I could test some client server code at scale. Creating a number of VMs from scratch would be a daunting task (not to mention resource intensive) so I decided I'd give LXC a whirl. I'd been aware of LXC and what it can do for some time but I'd never tried it, I found quite a few of the articles were lacking a bit on setup so I thought I'd document my findings so others didn't have to find out the hard way.
This was installed on my LinuxMint desktop, the one package that a lot of guides missed out was the templates. Templates are build scripts build up containers for you.
sudo apt-get install lxc lxc-templates
If you look at ifconfig on the host, you'll see a new bridge interface created for your Containers to connect onto. DHCP is provided on the 10.0.3.0/255 range by dnsmasq providing your containers access to the same network as your host. It will also allow access to the internet through the host machine.
$ ifconfig lxcbr0
lxcbr0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr fe:c6:fc:75:66:ae
inet addr:10.0.3.1 Bcast:10.0.3.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::6482:4aff:fea8:407f/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:3863 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5951 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:362523 (362.5 KB) TX bytes:6926072 (6.9 MB)
If you're looking to run debian based containers you'll need to install debootstrap
sudo apt-get install debootstrap
and if you're wanting CentOS, you'll need yum
sudo apt-get install yum
Once this is done you have everything you need.
First see what templates are available
# ls /usr/share/lxc/templates/
lxc-alpine lxc-busybox lxc-debian lxc-gentoo lxc-oracle lxc-ubuntu
lxc-altlinux lxc-centos lxc-download lxc-openmandriva lxc-plamo lxc-ubuntu-cloud
lxc-archlinux lxc-cirros lxc-fedora lxc-opensuse lxc-sshd
The templates names are the files shown with the lxc- prefix removed. First I'll build up a centos Box
# lxc-create -t centos -n lxc-centos-2
Host CPE ID from /etc/os-release:
This is not a CentOS or Redhat host and release is missing, defaulting to 6 use -R|--release to specify release
Checking cache download in /var/cache/lxc/centos/x86_64/6/rootfs ...
Cache found. Updating...
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Setting up Update Process
base | 3.7 kB 00:00
base/primary_db | 4.6 MB 00:02
extras | 3.4 kB 00:00
extras/primary_db | 26 kB 00:00
updates | 3.4 kB 00:00
updates/primary_db | 749 kB 00:00
No Packages marked for Update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Cleaning repos: base extras updates
0 package files removed
Update finished
Copy /var/cache/lxc/centos/x86_64/6/rootfs to /var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/rootfs ...
Copying rootfs to /var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/rootfs ...
sed: can't read /etc/init/tty.conf: No such file or directory
Storing root password in '/var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/tmp_root_pass'
Expiring password for user root.
passwd: Success
Container rootfs and config have been created.
Edit the config file to check/enable networking setup.
The temporary root password is stored in:
'/var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/tmp_root_pass'
The root password is set up as expired and will require it to be changed
at first login, which you should do as soon as possible. If you lose the
root password or wish to change it without starting the container, you
can change it from the host by running the following command (which will
also reset the expired flag):
chroot /var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/rootfs passwd
The example above is quite a short output, when you run it for the first time, you will get much more output as LXC grabs all the files it needs from the CentOS repository.
Now just run it
lxc-start -n lxc-centos-2
CentOS release 6.7 (Final)
Kernel 3.19.0-25-generic on an x86_64
lxc-centos-2 login: init: rcS main process (7) killed by TERM signal
Entering non-interactive startup
iptables: No config file. [WARNING]
Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ]
Bringing up interface eth0:
Determining IP information for eth0... done.
[ OK ]
Starting system logger: [ OK ]
awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot open file `/etc/mtab' for reading (No such file or directory)
Mounting filesystems: [ OK ]
Generating SSH2 RSA host key: [ OK ]
Generating SSH1 RSA host key: [ OK ]
Generating SSH2 DSA host key: [ OK ]
Starting sshd: [ OK ]
CentOS release 6.7 (Final)
Kernel 3.19.0-25-generic on an x86_64
lxc-centos-2 login:
There you are, you can see all your containers with
# lxc-ls
lxc-centos-1 lxc-centos-2
# lxc-info -n lxc-centos-2
Name: lxc-centos-2
State: RUNNING
PID: 21055
IP: 10.0.3.201
CPU use: 1.06 seconds
BlkIO use: 56.00 KiB
Memory use: 2.85 MiB
KMem use: 0 bytes
Link: veth3GI7HY
TX bytes: 1.42 KiB
RX bytes: 5.25 KiB
Total bytes: 6.67 KiB
You can see the network interface for the container on your host
# ifconfig veth3GI7HY
veth3GI7HY Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr fe:c6:2d:53:f1:d8
inet6 addr: fe80::fcc6:2dff:fe53:f1d8/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:36 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1458 (1.4 KB) TX bytes:5607 (5.6 KB)
You can see how lightweight these containers are in disk usage
# du -hs /var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/
385M/var/lib/lxc/lxc-centos-2/
To test it's speed lets create 10 containers
# time for NUM in `seq 10 20`; do lxc-create -t centos -n lxc-centos-$NUM; lxc-start -d -n lxc-centos-$NUM; done
...
...
real0m52.756s
user0m36.676s
system 0m16.356s
52 seconds to create and start 10 Containers
# lxc-ls
lxc-centos-10 lxc-centos-11 lxc-centos-12 lxc-centos-13 lxc-centos-14 lxc-centos-15 lxc-centos-16 lxc-centos-17 lxc-centos-18 lxc-centos-19 lxc-centos-20
Don't need them anymore? lets just get rid of them.
# time for NUM in `seq 10 20`; do lxc-destroy -f -n lxc-centos-$NUM; done
real0m3.815s
user0m0.176s
system 0m2.744s
Each container runs SSH, so you can treat it as just another server when it comes to management. For development an use of leightweight systems, LXC really is the way forward.
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Critical Firefox Vulnerability
Posted: 2015-08-07 12:14:43 by Alasdair Keyes
If you're not aware, a critical Firefox vulnerability has been found being exploited in the wild.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/08/06/firefox-exploit-found-in-the-wild/
It can affect Windows, Linux and MacOSX (althouth Mac hasn't been actively exploited) and allows a remote attacker to read any files you have permissions for on your local machine.
It's pretty shocking and if you use Firefox, you should update straight away. I mean, don't even finish this article. Upgrade it and then come back. There's no details how long this exploit has been in the wild for, so potentially, a lot of personal data has been hoovered up.
If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz
Finding subdomain IPs
Posted: 2015-07-31 16:58:57 by Alasdair Keyes
While analyzing my weblogs, I noticed a my site getting crawled by a server/hostname that I'd previously been receiving spam from, they gathered site data and then sent spam based on what they'd found.
I thought it was worth stopping this, but from what I could see the site was being scanned from more than one subdomain. I could block just the hostnames that had accessed my site, but I thought it was worth taking a more proactive stance.
https://gitlab.com/snippets/1731307/raw
I wrote the attached script to try and find all subdomains so I could block the IPs.
Obviously, if AXFR zone transfer is enabled for the domain, that's the way to get the information, but most nameservers have that disabled.
The script uses the dig tool via bind-utils in Redhat based distros or dnsutils in Debian based ones.
A quick breakdown of it's use - google.com for a test...
$ ./find_subdomain.sh google.com
admin.google.com.96INA74.125.195.113
admin.google.com.43INAAAA2a00:1450:400c:c01::64
api.google.com.43INCNAMEapi.l.google.com.
api.l.google.com.96INA74.125.195.105
...
www.google.com.96INA74.125.195.147
www.google.com.43INAAAA2a00:1450:400c:c01::63
Show just IPs, not CNAME entries
$ ./find_subdomain.sh google.com -a
admin.google.com.96INA74.125.195.113
admin.google.com.43INAAAA2a00:1450:400c:c01::64
api.l.google.com.96INA74.125.195.105
...
www.google.com.96INA74.125.195.147
www.google.com.43INAAAA2a00:1450:400c:c01::63
Get just the IPs
$ ./find_subdomain.sh google.com -a -i
74.125.195.113
2a00:1450:400c:c01::64
74.125.195.105
...
74.125.195.147
2a00:1450:400c:c01::63
Get just IP v4 or v6 with the -4 and -6 switches. It will output duplicates if subdomains are on the same IPs, so filtering through sort -u is useful, using with xargs to build up iptables rules or similar.
$ ./find_subdomain.sh google.com -i -a -4 | sort -u | xargs -i echo iptables -A INPUT -s '{}' -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 108.170.217.164 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 108.170.217.165 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 108.170.217.166 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
...
iptables -A INPUT -s 64.9.224.68 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 64.9.224.69 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
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© Alasdair Keyes
IT Consultancy Services
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